What Do Editors Really Want?

From the Archive | Lit Salon on five things I want to see in writing ... and five things I don't

Hi, friends!

In case you haven’t heard, our newest 12-week intensive, For the Joy & the Sorrow: Writing the World, based on Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, started this week, and you’re not too late to join! At WITD, you’re never late and always enough. The intensive is open to all paid members. Already, the writing you’re creating in this intensive has made me laugh, gasp, and cry. It truly is extraordinary … and, yes, delightful. And using the chat for daily delights has been lovely—if you are not on the chat yet and want to be, here’s how to join.

And now, for my five things.

I got this idea from my brilliant friend Rae Pagliarulo, associate editor at Hippocampus Magazine, who visited Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL last fall. As part of her presentation, she generously shared five things that work for her as an editor, and five things that don’t.

Many commented on how helpful Rae’s presentation was.

So, with gratitude to Rae’s fine example, I offer you my own five things, something of a complement to my 11 Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I’ve Learned from Reading Thousands of Manuscripts.

I base these offerings on my editorial experience over 30 years—as editor-in-chief at Minnesota Parent, where I introduced first-person essays, fiction, and poetry, and where we won first place awards from the judges at Medill every year I was at the helm; as associate editor at The Rake magazine, the arts & culture magazine where my work specifically won awards from the American Society of Professional Journalists; as nonfiction editor at Orison Press, where I also served as contest judge; as juror for Millay Colony for the Arts; and as a developmental editor and book coach since 2010.

I hope one or more of these observations are helpful for you. ❤️

Five Things I Want From Writing

1. Start in the middle. I want to be thrown into your world, in medias res, wherever that might be, and whatever the work might be, whether essay or story, no on-ramp, no lengthy introduction, no hand-holding. I want to be caught off guard, knocked sideways, and left slightly disoriented as I run to catch up with you. No, I don’t want to be confused. That’s a turnoff. But I do want to be trusted to follow you as best I can while meaning gradually reveals itself. I want to stay at your heels, piecing things together just in time for your next hard turn, then follow you again, wherever you’re going, feeling all the while the great pleasure of the chase. And I’d like to feel that pleasure even if the chase is but a contemplative stroll in a still, sunlit field. Even then, I’d like to spot both the path and the horizon of understanding for myself, without you having to point it out to me every step of the way. I love the way Justin Torres does this in the first chapter of (and throughout) We the Animals, which you can read here.

2. A clarion voice. I want a voice that grabs me from the first sentence, because this is why I will run to catch up with you. And to note, a voice can grab me even if the first sentence is as simple as Torres’s “We wanted more” in the example above. Voice is not about writerly cartwheels. It’s about matching the tone and timbre of your narrator (even if that narrator is you) with the material you’re writing. Every project has its own voice. Maybe that voice is simply a different octave above or below your natural speaking voice, or maybe its cadence is slightly off kilter. Or maybe, if you’re writing fiction, it’s a voice wholly separate from yours. Finding the voice of your project requires you to listen to your material and be willing to experiment. Most writers become too attached too soon to the words that fall on the page. This is extremely limiting, because good writing happens in revision, and revision is not akin to rearranging furniture, its akin to remodeling the house. You must be willing to revise to find the sound of your own voice. I want a voice that is confident and unflinching. If the narrator is broken, let the voice dwell squarely in the sound of its own fracture. I want a voice so real I can feel the warmth of the narrator’s breath on my cheek. It doesn’t matter to me if the voice is booming, quirky, melodic, shy, or evasive—as long as it’s real. And yes, in a longer work, a voice can and often should mature or transform over the course of the journey. Be prepared to keep your ear to the tracks as you go to keep the voice true to itself. This can be subtle work. Of the great many voices I love, Dorothy Allison’s will always lure me. Here she is starting us off in Bastard Out of Carolina.

3. Language that is alive. I believe it is the job of writers to love language and to fight tirelessly to keep it alive and capable of holding truth. This requires real work. Making grocery lists, writing emails, and making small talk with a neighbor—these activities all use words, but do not inject new life into language. The only things that can do that are deep listening and a playful heart. And make no mistake, alive language is not about being “fancy.” To the contrary. Alive language is about being true, whatever that means to your project. Often we can achieve this, in part, by just a bit of defamiliarization, which means, in a sense, performing CPR on your sentences so that they breathe again. Another way to put this is that in order to do what Emily Dickenson says—tell the truth, but tell it slant—we have to wake up the tired old words we use every day for all the mundane work of life. Maybe it takes just a slight rearrangement of the syntax or grammar, or a simple swapping of one word for another. You can read more about defamiliarization here. Ultimately, in order to wake the language up, you need to be awake. That’s all. Wide awake. Nothing outrageous. Just wide open eyes, so that my eyes will stay open, too. A very short, very potent example of defamiliarization (and en media res, and voice) is found in Thomas Lux’s poem, “A Little Tooth.” That word, flyblown! Simple as a nod, powerful as a fist.

4. Plain, powerful words. Speaking of simplicity, I respond to writing that uses plain, powerful worker words to get the job done. As George Orwell said, “Never use a long word when a short one will do.” I want words as strong and stout as three-legged stools, bumping along unrelentingly with their little stool feet. I want words I can hold in my hands, stuff in my pockets, smash with a shovel, throw in a hole, chew with my teeth, block with my body, hoard in a cupboard, wrap in wool, grow in a garden, burn in the lamp, stow in my coffin. I want words that know their place as well as how to challenge it. Words that understand that their currency is the truth, and their only job is to both hold truth and it away till death do us part. Examples of plain language can vary as widely as finger prints—as shown by these two examples: Keise Laymon in these opening sentences of a section of Heavy and Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life.”

5. To feel something. No matter the genre, I want writing that makes me feel something. My personal preference is writing that devastates me, but, honestly, any feeling will do—you don’t have to make me cry. You can make me laugh or make me wistful. Anger me or elate me. Give me that slightly transported, vaguely disoriented sensation of something I can’t even name, but we all know it when we feel it. In fact, feeling something is ultimately, to me, even more important than aboutness. Certain hybrid, flash, or non-narrative work, and certainly some poetry, is not necessarily “about” any one thing. Instead, it’s a nonspecific explosion of meaning that cannot be neatly summed up, but that can leave us changed for the long haul. And that’s what I’m looking for. I want you to make me feel something, because that is why I’m here: to do what Louise Erdrich says is our main job, to feel.

Five Things I Don’t Want

1. Long on-ramps or explanations. Like I said, I want to be thrown into the deep end of your lake, and I want you to tell me only what I need to know and only as soon as I need to know it to keep from drowning (or, don’t tell me at all, if there’s a good chance I can figure it out for myself). I don’t need any long, tiring wind-ups or slow, tiring orientations. I just want to be firmly pushed through the door of your writing and left to my own devices to find my way in the dark, assuming you’ve built your house of meaning with strong beams and a nightlight.

2. To be bored. That might sound harsh, but every editor will admit that this is true. We read a lot. It’s important to grab our attention quickly and hold it. This is why, like every other editor, I so love a compelling voice. But again, it need not be a loud or highly unusual voice, just an urgent one, even if that urgency is a commanding hush, a slow burn. If this sounds difficult, it’s because often, it is. But it is worth every hour you devote to it. I know this firsthand, and not just from writing and editing. Back when I was a middle school teacher, I discovered quickly that the worst thing I could be in my classroom was … boring. As long as I worked to keep the material interesting, I could hold my students’ attention and prevent most of the headaches that middle school classrooms are famous for. And being interesting required two things above all: first, great consideration for my students—that is, not taking their attention for granted, but, rather, understanding that I needed to earn it; and second, a willingness and ability to observe myself from the outside. These are the same things required to prevent our writing from being boring: a great consideration for the reader and a willingness and ability to observe ourselves/our writing from the outside.

3. Predictability. One of the things I don’t want is to be able to predict the end of a sentence, paragraph, section, chapter, before I get there. I don’t want to anticipate many, most, or all of the images, phrases, metaphors, comparisons, etc. that are being delivered. I want to be surprised as often as possible—and this does not require major fireworks. Indeed, often fireworks are just a distraction. What I need are consistent, tiny delights along the path of your writing. A word like flyblown brings me joy. But the surprise can even be so subtle as to present itself through the way you use grammar and punctuation to wake me up and regain my attention before it slips, as Iselin Gambert does through the use of colons and repetition in this string of sentences from her beautiful essay, “The Great Chimera”:

Of course, many parts—or versions—of me died when my mother did. The Iselin who called her mom each evening after work as she unlocked her bicycle for the ride home: she died. The Iselin who relied on her mom to help pick out glasses frames that had just the right combination of quirky and elegant: she died. The Iselin who would sit curled up on the couch for hours with her mom gossiping about politics, literature, religion, celebrities, and the unbearable sweetness of my brother’s children: she died.

4. Excessively ornate language. I already know you can write, and that you love words, and that you probably know more of them than most people. The reason many of us write is—in addition to bearing the burning heat of something to say, the second heart of old stories thumping in our chests—that we love language and are enthralled by what it can do. It is the job of writers, yes, to collect and become familiar with as many words as we possibly can during the course of our one wild and precious life. However, it is also the work of writers to use the best word for the job, and to learn to weigh and measure words to assess their fitness for the sentences and paragraphs we are building, for the meaning they are charged with conveying, for the experience we wish our reader to have, for the feeling we are hoping to evoke. Naturally this means exercising some restraint and self-control over any urges to display our full collection of fancy words. Worker words might not showcase our vast vocabulary, but they are powerful. They get shit done. And they do it quietly and without fanfare, carrying the weight and meaning of story without drawing attention to themselves—and more importantly, without distracting our reader and demanding unnecessary cognitive burden simply to move through a sentence. In this way, worker words humbly allow the story—the meaning—to take center stage, while keeping themselves in the shadows. Similarly, prose built of plain potent images that place an emphasis on precision and clarity instead of ornamentation—and used only at the pace and quantity required to evoke the necessary understanding and emotion—will always outshine prose that is burdened by excessively decorative imagery delivered in such great quantity that the reader cannot reasonably metabolize, and therefore, picture and feel, those images, which is, in the end, the point. Where a plain word often outshines a fancy one, a single precise and essential image always outshines four or five decorative ones.

5. Over emoting. When an author, narrator, or a main character tells us how bad/scared/sad/etc. they feel, it can have the unfortunate and paradoxical effect of blocking the reader’s ability to feel anything for themselves. This is especially true regarding negative emotions. If you think of negative emotions as “hot,” then the best way to write them is “cold.” As Anton Chekhov said, “When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly ….Yes, be more cold.” Again, the more our stories express emotion, the less room we leave for the reader to feel any. Our job is simply to convey—en medias res, in a clarion voice, with awake and alive language that is plain and images that are strikingly precise—what happened, and let the reader understand and feel it for themselves. I teach the principle of writing hot cold using the Tony Earley scale, which Dylan Landis describes in The Brevity Blog:

   The writer Tony Earley offers his writing students a numerical scale that illustrates the be-more-cold principal. He actually draws it on the blackboard: two vertical lines, each scored with markings from one to ten. One scale represents the character’s expression of emotion, and the other, the reader’s depth of feeling.

   It works like this: The total of the two scales must equal not twenty, but ten—always ten. This means only one person gets to do all the emoting: the character or the reader. The writer can’t have it both ways.When the material is hot, we have to write cold.

   It might help to think of your story or essay as a small room, a room your reader wants to enter, and one in which overtly expressed emotion takes up space. In this metaphor, the more emotion you put into the room, the more crowded it becomes, leaving less space for your reader to enter and explore, to move about, touch the walls, find the windows and light switches, learn the textures and contours, and, ultimately, stay long enough to feel something.

That’s it for today—five things I want in writing, and five things I don’t.

I hope these thoughts are helpful to you in some small way. For me, this is about more than holding an editor or reader’s attention. It’s about our own journey as writers and humans seeking to find the heart of truth, which itself requires our most dogged commitment to words, to the scavenger hunt of finding them and to the endlessly fascinating task of arranging them.

These are the paths that lead to the portal of discovery, including a more honest self-discovery. And that, in turn, makes everything else possible.

Love,

Jeannine